News Archive - Feb 2009

Francis X. O'Neill Jr. Dies at 85

February 6, 2009: Francis X. O'Neill Jr., one of two FBI agents to witness the autopsy of President Kennedy, died Tuesday at the age of 85. See an obituary in the Boston Globe. O'Neill, who steadfastly supported the Warren Commission's lone gunman theory, ironically provided information counter to that theory. It was in O'Neill and his partner Jim Sibert's "FD 302" autopsy report that when the body arrived there had been "surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull." When interviewed by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Sibert explained that they wrote this because the autopsy doctors stated it aloud. O'Neill was also interviewed by the ARRB in 1997. When shown a JFK autopsy photo depicting an intact rear head, and asked him if the photo "resembles what you saw from the back of the head at the time of the autopsy," O'Neill replied "This looks like it's been doctored in some way." He also disputed the supplemental autopsy photos of the brain, saying "it appears to be too much." For more on the revelations in O'Neill's and others' ARRB testimony, see ARRB Medical Testimony.

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